I've decided to try to limit myself to five hundred words or so for these posts in order to encourage myself to blog more frequently. We'll see how that works out.
So, Infinite Jest!
For those of you who don't know, Infinite Jest was the novel of the 90's as far as the literary world was concerned, a thousand-plus-page opus from David Foster Wallace, often called a masterpiece, often called pretentious academic garbage, often called a lot of things because it is often discussed, and maybe that's a good enough reason to check it out on it's own. That's certainly what spurred me.
Infinite Jest is dense, and hard to summarize, but most succinctly it concerns the titular film, mostly referred to as simply "the Entertainment," which is so mesmerizing that anyone who watches it loses the desire to do anything except watch it again and again until they inevitably die, no longer having any inclination to attend to even basic bodily needs. The plot involves Canadian terrorists searching for the master copy in order to make copies and for mass dissemination as a kind of weapon against the United States, who have absorbed Canada as part of a new Organization of North American Nations, a kind of semi-hostile takeover in the guise of an alliance. There are dozens of characters and much of the actions centers around an elite tennis academy and a sort of halfway house nearby. It all takes place in the near future where years are no longer numbered but named by various corporations after consumer products. If this all sounds very weird then you're absolutely right.
I started reading Infinite Jest primed to hate it. Several authors and critics I respect had expressed negative opinions of it, and many of the things I knew about David Wallace and his writing style were turn-offs. The whole postmodern thing has always seemed kind of masturbatory to me, and my eyes generally start to roll when that certain breed of modern novelist starts "satirizing" advertising and consumer culture, portraying US citizens as mindless corporate pawns, which has always smacked false to me, like your out-of-touch dad turning on the TV to an episode of Beavis and Butthead and extrapolating from that his entire opinion of millennial society.
And to start with, my preconceptions seemed accurate. It took a few hundred pages for my opinion to start changing. That probably doesn't sound like a ringing endorsement, and I would agree, if not for the novel's reputation I doubt I would have had the drive to power through it, but let me put it this way: Infinite Jest is on its own wavelength, and it took me time to adjust to it's eccentricities: the fractal structure, the large cast, the way it sort of bounces off important conflicts and plot points rather than dealing with them directly--it's frustrating if you're not prepared for it, and I wasn't. But around maybe page 300 I was starting to get in the groove of things, and another two hundred pages later I was tearing through the book, finishing the second half in a couple weeks after slogging through the first half for a few months. Near the end of the book I was as eager to chew through fifty pages on the nuances of competitive tennis as anything else, and if that's not the product of some kind of genius I don't know what is.
I won't try to summarize themes, or analyze Wallace's writing style, or any of the other sorts of things I would be tempted to do with most other media that I am likely to blog about on here, because frankly I'm unqualified. What I will say is this: reading Infinite Jest fundamentally changed my understanding of writing as an art form, and gave me new lenses through which to examine myself as a person, and if that's not the mark of great fiction, I don't know what is. It's a difficult read, but worth it, and I would recommend it to anyone.
Damn, not quite under 500 words, I'll have to try harder next time.
-N